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Topic: Message Quoting Tips and Tricks (Read 2306 times)

Normally, to quote another person's message, you click and it will put the quoted text into a neat little box, and you type what you want to say at the end.

But what if you want to break the quote up into pieces and respond to sections individually?

I am going to show you how to do this.

You may need to click the images below to enlarge them enough to see them clearly.

When you click the , you will get something that looks like this:

See that at the beginning is [quote , some other stuff, and then the closing ] .

The [quote ] is the important part1. This tells the forum software that you are beginning a quote, so it can put the quoted text into a box.

I am leaving spaces because without them, the forum software would render a quote instead of showing you the characters, but you need to type it as shown in the image.

See that at the end is [/quote ] . The added / tells the forum software this is the end of a quote, so it will close the box that contains the quoted text.

All you need for a tidy and easily understood quote is that for each opening [quote ] (without the space), you have a [/quote ] (without the space).

This is true even for nested quotes where you might quote someone who is quoting you or someone else.

So, if I wanted to quote the message shown in the image, and respond to each part individually, I would just need to include [/quote ] at the end of the first part, and another [quote ] at the beginning of the 2nd part, like such:

This will give you something that looks like this:

Pretty cool how simple that is, isn't it?

Another cool thing the forum software will do is that if you want to quote multiple people in one response, you can quote the first one the normal way, with the ,and then use the little link "Insert Quote" shown on the upper right of the Topic Summary, just below the date of the post - there will be a link like that for each previous post shown in the Topic Summary:

And it will add a quote from the post you selected.

Another thing you can do is copy and paste the text you want to quote into your reply box, highlight it, and click and it will automatically surround the highlighted text with the quoting code. For some situations, this is clearly the easiest.

1 The other stuff is important too, but not critical. It gives the original poster's name, a link to the original post, and the date the original post was made.